The present invention relates to a power supply source control system for controlling a plurality of independent power supply sourced included in a plurality of logical units.
There has been proposed a system for controlling and monitoring the operations of a plurality of power supply sources provided in a plurality of loical units using a system-power-supply-source controller. In such a system, each logical unit includes a plurality of functional blocks and the power supply source comprises a plurality of power supply portions, each of which supplies a power source voltage to a corresponding functional block. Each logical unit is further provided with signal lines transmitting control signals for instructing the power-on and power-off operations and interruption signals for indicating malfunction occurrences of power supply sources. The number and length of such signal lines inevitably become quite extensive, presenting problems such as increasing the size of the controller and pushing the cost up. Further, as the number of control signals increases, the number of signal lines must be increased. This requires remodelling of the interface between the controller and each logical unit, causing almost insurmountable difficulty in practice.
One object of the present invention is, therefore, to provide a power supply source control system free from the above-mentioned disadvntage in the known system.